


kingfisher

by yoonbot (iverins)



Category: SEVENTEEN (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Internalized Homophobia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-05
Updated: 2019-10-05
Packaged: 2020-11-24 04:29:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20901662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/iverins/pseuds/yoonbot
Summary: Junhui had always assumed every storm was regretful about the wreckage it left behind.





	kingfisher

Junhui fell into the deep end of a pool when he was eight.

Wonwoo's sitting on the front steps with a cigarette when Junhui tip-toes out, shoulders hunching like the face of a moss-covered mountain. When Junhui was small, he climbed one with his brother and his parents pointed out what was supposed to be a monkey-shaped rock in the fog. No matter how much they squinted, they couldn't see even the silhouette of it.

Wonwoo squints at him now, half his face shaded a violent kind of magenta, sleeves pulled past his fingers. "Is that you, Jun?"

He thinks about – "Yeah." How it rained that night. Junhui remembers the dull ache in his lungs so clearly, cousins to the anchor of heartbreak. You could go as far as you wanted and always be tethered back by that chain, steadfast in the midst of a shallow sea.

Wonwoo flicks the ashes off the end. He did small things so thoughtlessly like that. Only later would Junhui think back and wonder if they all added up to something he would never understand. "Thought so."

They said he stopped breathing for thirty-three seconds after they pulled him back to the surface. They thought he was gone.

The rush of passing cars sounds so, so similar to the ocean swell at night.

"Isn't it tiring?" says Wonwoo, through the smoke, "always having to run?"

But the waves always find their way back to the shore, don't they?

The thing is, Junhui's not afraid of the water.

One time, Wonwoo asked if Junhui wanted him to teach him how to swim. That was a little after they'd first met, when Wonwoo still had a girlfriend. He'd looked at Junhui with his hair all wet, and after Junhui said no, he asked – probably more importantly – "Do you already know how?"

The summer Junhui nearly drowned, he introduced himself to his class as the kid who died for thirty-three seconds. It was the kind of thing you did with pride at that age. He shrugged. "Sorta."

There was a smudge of unblended sunscreen on Wonwoo's jaw. "Sorta," he echoed carefully, as if rolling it on his tongue to taste.

"Yeah." The sun hadn't been out that day, and it turned dark early that evening. Later, the briny sea water washed Wonwoo's face clean. _Sorta._

"I didn't like you much back then," Wonwoo told him sometime after, when they'd become more or less friends. He was oddly truthful in the way he responded directly if prompted. Otherwise, Junhui looked over at him in the in-between moments when they were both silent, wondering if he secretly hated him.

"Oh." Wonwoo looked at him from where he was lying on Soonyoung's beat-up sofa. _You'll go blind, you know, if you keep reading like that,_ he told him the last time, to which Wonwoo just shrugged. That was before he and his girlfriend had broken up. Junhui only met her once, and she didn't leave enough of an impression for him to comment about it.

He swallowed. An ocean threatened to spill out his throat.

"Me neither," he lied.

Because in an alternate universe, Junhui would've assumed it'd go like this:

"Do you think you'd like me?" Wonwoo asks with the scent of vodka in his breath, "if I was a girl?"

Junhui would look into the distance then, at the blurry mandarin of a slow-sweltering sunset. Other times, they'd be in the dark, and the shadows would pool in the space he'd think Wonwoo's eyes were supposed to be. Or, Junhui would wake up to a gray sky, tasting the beginnings of a typhoon and its ravenous desire to destroy when he licked the back of his teeth. The wind would whip the words out from his mouth and embed themselves into the seams of Wonwoo's hoodie, as dispersed seeds look for soft earth to settle in.

Either way: "I think I'd like you," and the sky would be painted with the blood of the day. The sun would kiss its reflection in the sea, and achingly tender, "even if you weren't a girl."

Wonwoo, sitting on those steps, with that cigarette unextinguished between his long fingers, profile set aflame by the too-bright twilight: “What do you have to be afraid of, Jun-ah?”

Storms, then.

“Did you love her?” Junhui asks when Wonwoo offhandedly says, “I don’t have a girlfriend anymore,” in the midst of them waiting for more players to join their mobile game one night.

“I’m sorry,” Junhui told him.

Wonwoo shook his head. “There’s nothing for you to be sorry for.”

Wonwoo looks at him all weird. Like he’s waiting for Junhui to say more but he knows Junhui won’t say it, so all that’s left for him is to stare. “I don’t know,” he finally answers, thickly.

When Junhui was eight, he fell into the deep end of a pool. “Oh,” and he feels it now as he did then, the dull ache in his lungs. He remembers this – it was raining that night. “I’m sorry.”

Lightning rips through the sky. Their phones lay between them, forgotten to the downpour outside.

“Don’t be,” Wonwoo says looking at the window, as if contemplating the tempest.

Each story of heartbreak was a cautionary tale on distance, and how it was best kept. Didn’t matter if it happened to be evenly cleaved in two, or if it’d smashed the ribcage on its way out, or if it was Wonwoo, telling Junhui not to feel sorry.

Junhui had always assumed every storm was regretful about the wreckage it left behind. 

Junhui stuffs his hands into his pockets. "What d'you mean?"

One time, he and Wonwoo had gone to see the ocean. It'd been July, and they'd still been in university, which was really not that long ago if Junhui thinks about it.

"You know," Wonwoo had said suddenly, bent over a cracked conch shell in the sand. The weather'd been horrible then, all overcast, and they were the only two on the beach other than this old man walking his large brown dog in the distance. "Aren't you like this?"

Junhui circled back. "What d'you mean?" he'd said then, eerily like now.

Wonwoo closed an eye and peered down into the opening. "No matter how much I look," he told him evenly, "there'll always be this part of you, closed off from me."

The air's muggy and still around them. "I mean." It makes Wonwoo's words all the more deafening and devastating in their gentleness. "That you've done this before, to me."

Junhui feels his fingers clam up. Somewhere down the road is the sound of a passing car.

Wonwoo, with the scent of vodka in his breath, in a continuum of that alternate universe: “Because I like you, Jun-ah.”

The sky had been impossibly blue. That’s why they had gone in the first place. He could see it beyond the surface of the pool, and his lungs had burned, and he wondered if this would be the merciful end, on this too beautiful day.

Junhui never told anyone this, but he was terrified.

He sits down beside Wonwoo on those steps. “Did I ever tell you that I died for thirty-three seconds?” he says, quick and into the sleeve of his own sweater.

Wonwoo turns to him, suddenly. Like this, the light’s less harsh and it makes his face look softer. “Shit, Jun.” He rubs the heel of his hand with the cigarette in it against his cheek. “_Shit._”

Junhui laughs sadly. “I was eight.”

Wonwoo brushes his arm when he stands up. He throws his cigarette butt on the ground, stamps it out. Looks at Junhui like it means something with a tiredness in his eyes, backlit from the sun. “I’m glad you didn’t die then,” he confesses, “or else I would’ve never met you.” He had always been oddly truthful in this way, responding directly if prompted.

Wonwoo did small things so thoughtlessly like that. Only later would Junhui think back and wonder if they all added up to something he would never understand.

Because if you asked him, Junhui would tell you his love was like –

That was it, exactly. You could scrape your knees on the pool floor and the chlorinated water would make them sting. It would suck the blood from your wounds until they were dry and swollen and you stood shakily after pulling yourself out from its clutches. Still, it would want more.

Like a typhoon.

“Do you think you’ll run away again?” asks Wonwoo after this admission, kindly.

Junhui squints from the setting sun behind him. “I think,” he says as if from underwater. “Not this time.”

So.

Storms, then.

**Author's Note:**

> [EDITED: 10/08/19]
> 
> [twitter](https://twitter.com/bewearer) // [cc](https://curiouscat.me/715creeks) (｡･･｡)


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